Welcome to the 3D era! Well… sorta. Sega enjoyed quite a success with the Mega Drive so there’s no reason to force developers to write 3D games right now.
Just in case developers want the extra dimension, Sega adapted some bits of the hardware to enable polygon drawing as well. Hopefully, the result didn’t get out of hand!
Rodrigo Copetti
These in-depth analyses by Copetti are always a treat, and the Saturn one is no exception.
Saturn was a very interesting piece of hardware, and did a lot of things right (Including being the first console with an analog controller)But, it was a complicated design that made it difficult to optimize, especially when it came time to porting 3D titles from the Sony Playstation, and from the PC (Which had been doing 3D for a while).
Plus, Sega burned through resources trying to design and sell the SegaCD and the Sega 32X (Not to mention the Nomad), so they were already stretched thin when trying to get the Saturn into people’s homes. I never knew anybody that owned a Saturn.
IIRC, Dreamcast emulators came out before Saturn emulators.
Yes, the Saturn whilst more powerful, the architecture is simpler than the saturn with it’s 2 SH-2 cpus.
I ment dreamcast was more powerful, and saturn is more complicated in terms of design. Also there was few really good games for the saturn in western markets. Most good games was never translated from japanese.